# Working with public hosted zones
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A public hosted zone is a container that holds information about how you want to route traffic on the internet for a specific domain, such as example.com, and its subdomains (acme.example.com, zenith.example.com). You get a public hosted zone in one of two ways:
+ When you register a domain with Route 53, we create a hosted zone for you automatically.
+ When you transfer DNS service for an existing domain to Route 53, you start by creating a hosted zone for the domain. For more information, see [Making Amazon Route 53 the DNS service for an existing domainMaking Route 53 the DNS service for an existing domain](MigratingDNS.md).

In both cases, you then create records in the hosted zone to specify how you want to route traffic for the domain and subdomains. For example, you might create a record to route traffic for www.example.com to a CloudFront distribution or to a web server in your data center. For more information about records, see [Working with records](rrsets-working-with.md).

This topic explains how to use the Amazon Route 53 console to create, list, and delete public hosted zones. 

**Note**  
You can also use a Route 53 *private* hosted zone to route traffic within one or more VPCs that you create with the Amazon VPC service. For more information, see [Working with private hosted zones](hosted-zones-private.md).

**Topics**
+ [Considerations when working with public hosted zones](hosted-zone-public-considerations.md)
+ [Creating a public hosted zone](CreatingHostedZone.md)
+ [Getting the name servers for a public hosted zone](GetInfoAboutHostedZone.md)
+ [Listing public hosted zones](ListInfoOnHostedZone.md)
+ [Viewing DNS query metrics for a public hosted zone](hosted-zone-public-viewing-query-metrics.md)
+ [Deleting a public hosted zone](DeleteHostedZone.md)
+ [Checking DNS responses from Route 53](dns-test.md)
+ [Configuring white-label name servers](white-label-name-servers.md)
+ [NS and SOA records that Amazon Route 53 creates for a public hosted zone](SOA-NSrecords.md)
+ [Enabling accelerated recovery for managing public DNS records](accelerated-recovery.md)